AEOLIAN HARP

(from Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds), stringed musical instrument played by the wind. It is made of a wooden sound box about 3 feet by 5 inches by 3 inches (1 m by 13 cm by 8 cm) that is loosely strung with 10 or 12 gut strings. These strings are all of the same length but vary in thickness and hence in elasticity. The strings are all tuned to the same pitch. In the wind they vibrate in aliquot parts (i.e., in halves, thirds, fourths . . . ) thus sounding the octave, 12th, second octave, and succeedingly higher harmonics of the string's fundamental note. The principle of natural vibration of strings by the pressure of the wind has long been recognized. According to legend, King David hung his kinnor (a kind of lyre) above his bed at night to catch the wind, and in the 10th century Dunstan of Canterbury produced sounds from a harp by allowing the wind to blow through its strings. The first known Aeolian harp was constructed by Athanasius Kircher and was described in his Musurgia Universalis (1650). The Aeolian harp was popular in Germany and England during the Romantic movement of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Two attempts to devise a keyboard version using a bellows were the anmocorde (1789), invented by Johann Jacob Schnell, and the piano olien (1837), by M. Isouard.